Hard work beats talent every day of the week. Here’s your homework. Watch a documentary called The Good Son. It’s about a boxer named Ray Boom Boom Mancini, and you might have heard of him because Ray Boom Boom Mancini was the boxer who killed South Korean fighter. And the documentary talks about what happened, and it’s an incredible documentary. But one thing that stood out when I watched the show was simply this, Ray Mancini said his brother was more naturally talented. He was taller, he had a longer arm span, he just moved faster, etc., etc. But Ray Boom Boom Mancini said, “I had more heart. I made it more of my obsession. I trained much harder than he did. When I get knocked down, I get up.” And so it was a great example to me that hard work and grit and resilience and commitment is so much more valuable than your natural gift. There’s a psychologist named James Flynn and he has come up with a term called capitalization, and I want you to write this down as well. I want you to think about it and maybe journal about it later today. And the word capitalization really speaks to this idea. It is not your natural genius or abilities that determine how successful you become. It is how much you capitalize on the abilities you were born with that determines your productivity, performance, overall success. I want to repeat that again because I want you to really go even deeper on it. Capitalization means it’s not the talent you are born with that determines the extent of your victory. It is how much of the talent you are born with that you actually materialize through practice, through training, through relentlessness that determines the extent of your supremacy in your domain.
